Business/Technology Coaching

I’m going to write this article backwards. First I’m going to teach you rules of Astral Travel. Then I will tell you how to go out of body.

On the Astral you are what you think

Ever wanted that perfect body? Decide you have it on the astral and you do. Your decision of who you are, is what you will be on the astral. My personal favorite forms are either myself in wonderful shape or a 50’ long Red Dragon. You CAN be other things; however, on the astral, your body shapes and is shaped by your thoughts. If you focus on thinking a certain way, but want a different body you will be able to maintain it until you stop focusing on the body.

For example: If I want to keep thinking like a man, but have the body of a woman, I can, but it takes focus to maintain the form. However, if I am willing to get into “character” as a woman it is quite easy to keep the form. You can learn a LOT by getting into different characters. My personal favorites include a Tree, a Mountain, a Sparrow, a drop of water in a stream and a brown bear.

Things are more Detailed the more you get into Character

Everything on the astral is about belief. Truth is whatever you believe it is. Yes. It is possible to die on the astral. However, it is also possible to have bullets go flying right through you or catch them Neo style. There is kind of a sweet spot I have found where I get to enjoy the experience of being in character, but stay aware that I’m the writer and director as well. If I don’t like the part I change it.

One of the consequences of being out of character is that the details don’t tend to be there. For example, if I am in complete writer mode for a sex scene on the astral I don’t tend to feel my partner(s) or smell them in the moment. It’s more like I remember the experience. If you want to immerse yourself in something you can, but you trade the power to change things for the details and intimacy of the experience. BE VERY CAREFUL what you immerse yourself in. Dying is a hard thing to return from even here.

On the astral the story is what you choose (if you choose)

A nice option is to script a situation and then immerse yourself in it. For example, I decide I would like to experience flying through the air as a winged version of myself. If that is all that I define, the experience will start out as this and as I get into character it will begin taking form and flow of its own. For example, I once started exactly this. After flying fine on my own for a while, I ended up meeting a woman friend of mine who I routinely interact with on the astral. After talking and flying with her for a while we ended up flying down and through a portal into a different reality. This one was STUNNINGLY beautiful. It was like going from effortlessly flying above a scrub-brush desert to suddenly flying over the northwestern coast of Ireland. Here I noticed that it was harder to fly and I needed thermals and willpower to keep myself up.

My lady friend and I separated while exploring this place only to find that there was a religious order of monks out to destroy “spirits and evil magics” who had seen the two of us flying and were trying to find us. It was so real I could tell you just how the monks smelled. I went looking for the portal we came through and was having a very hard time seeing it. Whereas in the previous reality it was clear and obvious, here it was like it was a hard to see crease in the fabric of space…

…The story went on. At this point I was totally immersed in it. I forgot that I had another life to return to. This was my reality. When I returned through the portal I remembered myself again and returned.

You CAN experience anything, but it takes a lot of work to craft something very detailed and intricate. Each detail is a decision; When you’re detailing a room, that’s a whole lot of decisions. Obviously a whole world is countless decisions. Most people end up learning to specify a lot of it and then letting go and trusting in spirit to create the rest. Usually we will end up “auto-creating” similar challenges to ones we are facing in real life. The nice thing is that this gives us an opportunity to experience the whole circumstance from a new point of view and we often gain new understandings that empower us to overcome these challenges in our Day to Day Lives.

On the Astral, Time is more a guideline than a Law

We live our lives like characters in a Movie being played on the big screen. We act everything out linearly; Scene 1, Scene 2 and so on.

The Astral plane is kind of like being on the set of a movie. There are a lot of distractions, it’s easy to get out of character and they don’t always shoot the Scenes linearly. It is perfectly possible to experience a touching relationship moment with someone there before you meet them.

Remote Viewing

Once you are out of body choose a reality, time, place and point of view and then step into character. Again… the more into character you can get, the more you can perceive the details that character could perceive. Unfortunately it’s really hard to get into character as someone else you don’t really understand. Unfortunately, if you want to be animal, vegetable or mineral you perceive things as they do and the fly on the wall really doesn’t really understand or care much about what the humans in the room are doing.

Likely you will want to stay out of the story and just be an incorporeal watcher. This has limitations with perceiving details:

- Time acts like it’s in stop-motion.

- Physical items with little energy in them don’t exist solidly or at all.

- You only hear Snippets vs. Whole Conversations.

- Everything tends to “feel like” something. We can remote view a moment and a place, but instead of - clearly seeing a statue of Thomas Jefferson in the middle of the room it tends to “feel like” something solid, heavy, smart, not living, respectable and like it’s looking over the room. The more carefully we “feel” it, the more clear our understanding of it becomes.

What to do if you die

As I posted in another article, I have experienced death on the Astral. I think that one of the major ways it differed from death on this plane is that my body here was still in good shape. If I get shot here and die it’s a lot harder to return because the body is damaged to where it has a hard time keeping everything together. When I died there, I disconnected and went off, but the body was still here in good shape waiting for me to return.

The Experience: As I said in “How to Survive Being Possessed” I was cocky to an instructor on the astral and he knocked me silly with a pretty cool trick before stabbing me through the gut and killing me. After he killed me I actually exited my Astral Body and did the classic floating over it thinking… “wow.”

Knowing that I needed to move on, I let go and everything lost form. My reality dissolved into floating amid light in complete and utter peace. The living have no idea how much our drive to survive is a constant pressure against us. Imagine you live your life with a jet engine going off in your face and then suddenly you are in a calm meadow. That doesn’t even come close to expressing how much un-peace we experience here in comparison. I knew I could have or experience anything, but there was no need. With no need, it’s easy to stop being Separate. Just let go. Float. Be. Time stopped existing.

Suddenly I felt fear: fear that I was ceasing to exist. I knew I had choices. I could let go and be in the light, I could move on to a new life or I could return. I chose to return. And in choosing, it just happened. I formed a new astral body, flew it back into my physical body and woke up.

Other Issues

Some people have trouble with reality flipping around as their thoughts wander. There’s a bit of a trick to this. Your astral experience responds to belief more than thought. Choose your beliefs and hold onto them, then think your thoughts lightly. Kind of the difference between thoughts you speak and thoughts you think quietly. Once you are holding onto your current astral location with your belief it’s easy to think your thoughts and begin getting a handle on the difference between thinking and believing.

Some people believe in a Silver Cord between the “soul” and the body when projecting. I’ve personally experienced one on a couple of my trips, while it didn’t exist for others. Some people believe that it’s the only thing connecting you to your body and if it’s cut you die. As those people wish I suppose. I DID experience a case where I had the cord, it got cut and I freaked for a moment before I realized it was kind of like climbing and having my safety cord get cut. If I’m climbing properly the safety line is just a backup and isn’t getting used anyway. I personally have noticed that my thoughts tend to draw me more completely back to my body. I choose to be in my body and I am. Plus the cord gets in the way of immersing yourself in other experiences. It’s probably a good idea to keep the cord when you’re new at this, but try to practice your astral work without relying on it. It IS kinda cool to tug on someone else’s cord and watch them go flying back into their body or even use your cord to do a fast return, but there ARE other ways. :-)

How to Go out of Body

There are pretty much two ways to go astral. One is to just project and the other one is to actually step out of your body.

Projecting

T o project you need to literally “project yourself” somewhere. You don’t have to form a full body to do so. Literally it is like splitting your focus. Ignore the part of you that is in the body and perceive yourself outside the body. As you gain skill, you start being able to perceive things from that point of view. This is the trick wanna-be poker cheaters use in stories. The problem is that all of the rules of incorporeal existence are there. So unless you charged each card with serious energy it will be hard to tell which card is which.

It is much easier to project yourself out of this reality. Most people call this day-dreaming if you aren’t controlling your actions. In truth it will probably take you a while to realize the difference between projecting inside to have your fantasies and projecting outside. If you want to prove to yourself that you are projecting outside, there is a wonderful technique:

Draw a grid at the bottom of a Shoebox. Then take 3 Items of very different size, shape, material and so on and put them into this box. Put the lid on, shake the box and put it down. Then project yourself out and into the box. I recommend intentionally flying top down to look in the box while projecting. While incorporeal you aren’t limited by the top because you can go right through it. Of course you are limited by the standard Remote Projection rules above. Return to your body and write down the details. Practice this for a while. It’s amazing how accurate you can get. :-)

Stepping Out for a Spirit Walk

I’m of two minds here. On one hand many of us do this accidentally once in a while as we sleep. On the other hand this is a GREAT way to have your body possessed.

The imagery I tend to use is we are spirits who have a special body and lots of practice using it. I consider it my “Mech” (A giant robot used for war in science fiction). My spirit gets in, grabs the controls and the body starts moving. For the vast majority of my human life I have been in the cockpit of this Body. Normally when I astral project I split my focus to do something else, but I still keep a hand on the controls.

It is possible however, to let go of the controls and exit the body. This can be a bit scary since most of us only know existing in the body. Additionally, when projecting, the act of returning to the body is as simple as letting go of the projection. This is why most people wake up when they “die” in dreams. They stopped projecting and BAM, were back in their bodies. When you actually step out, this doesn’t happen. However, Spirit Walking allows you to perceive your Out of Body experience more fully. It’s easier to understand what you are seeing or hearing, it’s easier to stay where you are, and it’s much easier to play a character without having to become them. I’ve never tried possessing someone while astral projecting (makes a note for later), but I’m quite confident that when you step out of body you can possess someone or something.

For this purpose I am defining possession as: Going Astral, retaining your identity and entering someone else’s body to access and/or influence their perceptions and experiences (IT IS possible to possess someone’s astral body by the way). Think of possessing other persons bodies while spirit walking, as stepping into their bodies cockpit and either just watching or actually screwing with the controls. If you were a complete ass you could kick them out, but hopefully for them you aren’t…

I would strongly recommend that once you start intentionally exiting your body you should make a habit of creating a safe space before you sleep. You have increased your chances of exiting your body as you sleep and it SUCKS coming back to your body to find it occupied.

If you are going to intentionally exit your body DEFINITELY make a safe space. My personal favorite is a physically drawn circle (could be my finger on the dirt or carpet), however I know others who use incense and sound to help them. Some shamanic paths prefer using tools and/or help to guide their return to their body. I recommend you try to get away from needing those tools as quickly as possible. Self Navigation is FAR less prone to failure. To me an experienced spirit walker worrying about someone else helping them find their way back is just silly. It shows that they were taught to fear and haven’t overcome the fear yet.

I’d like to point out that a safe space is more than a good safety backup. A couple years back I liked to do silly stuff like go Ghost Hunting. Long Story Short a ghost tricked me into agreeing to step out of my body to “guide it to the light.” Luckily I had read about a simple protection method for when one is spirit walking/astral projecting/whatever. So before I exited my body I cut a circle around myself with my athame in the dirt and stepped out.

The recommendation was that after you cut the circle and exit your body, you should stay in the circle until you see your spirit guide. I didn't have far to look. Right outside the circle I saw two things: The ghost in all its vicious blood red and black, and a coyote glaring at me and gesturing with its head. The coyote told me quite clearly. "Get back in your body. This spirit is NOT what you think it is. If you leave that circle without your body you will be in trouble."

Shocked and humbled I re-entered my body. I’ll post the full version of this story later, but suffice it to say that the circle probably saved my life that night.

Hopefully the article has given you a feel for how you might work with the astral, how to avoid the more simple things to avoid and provided a jump start to help you advance astral skill-set more quickly. Feel free to comment if you disagree and/or my post helped.

Scott

I’m writing this article backwards. First I’m going to teach you rules of Astral Travel. Then I will tell you how to go out of body.

On the Astral you are what you thinkEver wanted that perfect body? Decide you have it on the astral and you do. Your decision of who you are, is what you will be on the astral. My personal favorite forms are either myself in wonderful shape or a 50’ long Red Dragon. You CAN be other things; however, on the astral, your body shapes and is shaped by your thoughts.

If you focus on thinking a certain way, but want a different body you will be able to maintain it until you stop focusing on the body. For example: If I want to keep thinking like a man, but have the body of a woman, I can, but it takes focus to maintain the form. However, if I am willing to get into “character” as a woman it is quite easy to keep the form. You can learn a LOT by getting into different characters. My personal favorites include a Tree, a Mountain, a Sparrow, a drop of water in a stream and a brown bear.

Things are more Detailed the more you get into Character Everything on the astral is about belief. Truth is whatever you believe it is. Yes. It is possible to die on the astral. However, it is also possible to have bullets go flying right through you or catch them Neo style. There is kind of a sweet spot I have found where I get to enjoy the experience of being in character, but stay aware that I’m the writer and director as well. If I don’t like the part I change it.

One of the consequences of being out of character is that the details don’t tend to be there. For example, if I am in complete writer mode for a sex scene on the astral I don’t tend to feel my partner(s) or smell them in the moment. It’s more like I remember the experience. If you want to immerse yourself in something you can, but you trade the power to change things for the details and intimacy of the experience. BE VERY CAREFUL what you immerse yourself in. Dying is a hard thing to return from even here.

On the astral the story is what you choose (if you choose)A nice option is to script a situation and then immerse yourself in it. For example, I decide I would like to experience flying through the air as a winged version of myself. If that is all that I define, the experience will start out as this and as I get into character it will begin taking form and flow of its own. For example, I once started exactly this. After flying fine on my own for a while, I ended up meeting a woman friend of mine who I routinely interact with on the astral. After talking and flying with her for a while we ended up flying down and through a portal into a different reality. This one was STUNNINGLY beautiful. It was like going from effortlessly flying above a scrub-brush desert to suddenly flying over the northwestern coast of Ireland. Here I noticed that it was harder to fly and I needed thermals and willpower to keep myself up.

My lady friend and I separated while exploring this place only to find that there was a religious order of monks out to destroy “spirits and evil magics” who had seen the two of us flying and were trying to find us. It was so real I could tell you just how the monks smelled. I went looking for the portal we came through and was having a very hard time seeing it. Whereas in the previous reality it was clear and obvious, here it was like it was a hard to see crease in the fabric of space…

…The story went on. At this point I was totally immersed in it. I forgot that I had another life to return to. This was my reality. When I returned through the portal, I remembered myself again and returned.

You CAN experience anything, but it takes a lot of work to craft something very detailed and intricate. Each detail is a decision; When you’re detailing a room, that’s a whole lot of decisions. Obviously a whole world is countless decisions. Most people end up learning to specify a lot of it and then letting go and trusting in spirit to create the rest. Usually we will end up “auto-creating” similar challenges to ones we are facing in real life. The nice thing is that this gives us an opportunity to experience the whole circumstance from a new point of view and we often gain new understandings that empower us to overcome these challenges in our Day to Day Lives.

On the Astral, Time is more a guideline than a LawWe live our lives like characters in a Movie being played on the big screen. We act everything out linearly; Scene 1, Scene 2 and so on.

The Astral plane is kind of like being on the set of a movie. There are a lot of distractions, it’s easy to get out of character and they don’t always shoot the Scenes linearly. It is perfectly possible to experience a touching relationship moment with someone there before you meet them.

Remote ViewingOnce you are out of body choose a reality, time, place and point of view and then step into character. Again… the more into character you can get, the more you can perceive the details that character could perceive. Unfortunately it’s really hard to get into character as someone else you don’t really understand. Additionally, if you want to be animal, vegetable or mineral you perceive things as they do; the fly on the wall really doesn’t really care or understand about what the humans in the room are doing.

Likely you will want to stay out of the story and just be an incorporeal watcher. This has limitations with perceiving details:

Time acts like it’s in stop-motion.

Physical items with little energy in them don’t exist solidly or at all.

You only hear Snippets vs. Whole Conversations. - Everything tends to “feel like” something. We can remote view a moment and a place, but instead of - clearly seeing a statue of Thomas Jefferson in the middle of the room it tends to “feel like” something solid, heavy, smart, not living, respectable and like it’s looking over the room. The more carefully we “feel” it, the more clear our understanding of it becomes.

What to do if you dieAs I posted in another article, I have experienced death on the Astral. I think that one of the major ways it differed from death on this plane is that my body here was still in good shape. If I get shot here and die it’s a lot harder to return because the body is damaged to where it has a hard time keeping everything together. When I died there, I disconnected and went off, but the body was still here in good shape waiting for me to return.

The Experience: As I said in “How to Survive Being Rolled and Possessed” I was cocky to an instructor on the astral and he knocked me silly with a pretty cool trick before stabbing me through the gut and killing me. After he killed me I actually exited my Astral Body and did the classic floating over it thinking… “wow.”

Knowing that I needed to move on, I let go and everything lost form. My reality dissolved into floating amid light in complete and utter peace. The living have no idea how much our drive to survive is a constant pressure against us. Imagine you live your life with a jet engine going off in your face and then suddenly you are in a calm meadow. That doesn’t even come close to expressing how much un-peace we experience here in comparison. I knew I could have or experience anything, but there was no need. With no need, it’s easy to stop being Separate. Just let go. Float. Be. Time stopped existing.

Suddenly I felt fear: fear that I was ceasing to exist. I knew I had choices. I could let go and be in the light, I could move on to a new life or I could return. I chose to return. And in choosing, it just happened. I formed a new astral body, flew it back into my physical body and woke up.

Other IssuesSome people have trouble with reality flipping around as their thoughts wander. There’s a bit of a trick to this. Your astral experience responds to belief more than thought. Choose your beliefs and hold onto them, then think your thoughts lightly. Kind of the difference between thoughts you speak and thoughts you think quietly. Once you are holding onto your current astral location with your belief it’s easy to think your thoughts and begin getting a handle on the difference between thinking and believing.

Some people believe in a Silver Cord between the “soul” and the body when projecting. I’ve personally experienced one on a couple of my trips, while it didn’t exist for others. Some people believe that it’s the only thing connecting you to your body and if it’s cut you die. As those people wish I suppose. I DID experience a case where I had the cord, it got cut and I freaked for a moment before I realized it was kind of like climbing and having my safety cord get cut. If I’m climbing properly the safety line is just a backup and isn’t getting used anyway. I personally have noticed that my thoughts tend to draw me more completely back to my body. I choose to be in my body and I am. Plus the cord gets in the way of immersing yourself in other experiences. It’s probably a good idea to keep the cord when you’re new at this, but try to practice your astral work without relying on it. It IS kinda cool to tug on someone else’s cord and watch them go flying back into their body or even use your cord to do a fast return, but there ARE other ways. :-)

How to Go out of Body

There are pretty much two ways to go astral. One is to just project and the other one is to actually step out of your body.

ProjectingTo project you need to literally “project yourself” somewhere. Literally it is like splitting your focus. Ignore the part of you that is in the body and perceive yourself outside the body. As you gain skill, you start being able to perceive things from that point of view. This is the trick wanna-be poker cheaters use in stories. The problem is that all of the rules of incorporeal existence are there. So unless you charged each card with serious energy it will be hard to tell which card is which.It is much easier to project yourself out of this reality.

Most people call this day-dreaming if you aren’t controlling your actions. In truth it will probably take you a while to realize the difference between projecting inside to have your fantasies and projecting outside. If you want to prove to yourself that you are projecting outside, there is a wonderful technique:

Draw a grid at the bottom of a Shoebox. Then take 3 Items of very different size, shape, material and so on and put them into this box. Put the lid on, shake the box and put it down. Then project yourself out and into the box. I recommend intentionally flying top down to look in the box while projecting. While incorporeal you aren’t limited by the top because you can go right through it. Of course you are limited by the standard Remote Projection rules above. Return to your body and write down the details. Practice this for a while. It’s amazing how accurate you can get. :-)

Stepping Out for a Spirit WalkI’m of two minds here. On one hand many of us do this accidentally once in a while as we sleep. On the other hand this is a GREAT way to have your body possessed. The imagery I tend to use is that we are spirits who have a special body and lots of practice using it. I consider it my “Mech” (A giant robot used for war in science fiction). My spirit gets in, grabs the controls and the body starts moving.

For the vast majority of my human life I have been in the cockpit of this Body. Normally when I astral project I split my focus to do something else, but I still keep a hand on the controls. It is possible however, to let go of the controls and exit the body. This can be a bit scary since most of us only know existing in the body.

When projecting, the act of returning to the body is as simple as letting go of the projection. This is why most people wake up when they “die” in dreams. They stopped projecting and BAM, were back in their bodies. When you actually step out, this doesn’t happen. However, Spirit Walking allows you to perceive your Out of Body experience more fully. It’s easier to understand what you are seeing or hearing, it’s easier to stay where you are, and it’s much easier to play a character without having to become them. I’ve never tried possessing someone while astral projecting (makes a note for later), but I’m quite confident that when you step out of body you can possess someone or something.

For this purpose I am defining possession as: Going Astral, retaining your identity and entering someone else’s body to access and/or influence their perceptions and experiences (IT IS possible to possess someone’s astral body by the way). Think of possessing other persons bodies while spirit walking, as stepping into their bodies cockpit and either just watching or actually screwing with the controls. If you were a complete ass you could kick them out, but hopefully for them you aren’t…

I would strongly recommend that once you start intentionally exiting your body you should make a habit of creating a safe space before you sleep. You have increased your chances of exiting your body as you sleep and it SUCKS coming back to your body to find it occupied.

If you are going to intentionally exit your body DEFINITELY make a safe space. My personal favorite is a physically drawn circle (could be my finger on the dirt or carpet), however I know others who use incense and sound to help them. Some shamanic paths prefer using tools and/or help to guide their return to their body. I recommend you try to get away from needing those tools as quickly as possible. Self Navigation is FAR less prone to failure. To me an experienced spirit walker worrying about someone else helping them find their way back is just silly. It shows that they were taught to fear and haven’t overcome the fear yet.

I’d like to point out that a safe space is more than a good safety backup. A couple years back I liked to do silly stuff like go Ghost Hunting. Long Story Short a ghost tricked me into agreeing to step out of my body to “guide it to the light.” Luckily I had read about a simple protection method for when one is spirit walking/astral projecting/whatever. So before I exited my body I cut a circle around myself with my athame in the dirt and stepped out.

The recommendation was that after you cut the circle and exit your body, you should stay in the circle until you see your spirit guide. I didn't have far to look. Right outside the circle I saw two things: The ghost in all its vicious blood red and black, and a coyote glaring at me and gesturing with its head. The coyote told me quite clearly. "Get back in your body. This spirit is NOT what you think it is. If you leave that circle without your body you will be in trouble."

Shocked and humbled I re-entered my body. I’ll post the full version of this story later, but suffice it to say that the circle probably saved my life that night.

Hopefully this article has given you a feel for how you might work with the astral, how to avoid the more simple things to avoid and provided a jump start to help you advance astral skill-set more quickly. Feel free to comment if you disagree and/or have stories.